


Fever

by bourbaki



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Assassination, Hurt/Comfort, Intrigue, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 02:05:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3363725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bourbaki/pseuds/bourbaki





	Fever

"You should get some sleep," Al says, heartbreakingly kind. "It wouldn’t do if you were to fall ill as well."

"Not tired," Ed says, automatically, even though it’s coming up on forty-eight hours and his back is absolutely killing him from sleeping on the wooden floor beside Roy’s sickbed. "Are you—is he—"

"There’s been no change," Al says. "I’m so sorry."

There’s buckets of water on the wooden floor. Ed had brought them in from the well. Alphonse—not Ed, which only drives home how helpless he is now, in this and in all things—can clap liquid water into solid ice, as he does now. The ice fights against the broiling summer heat, and Roy’s body’s impressive attempts at self-immolation. Ed then breaks the chunks into smaller pieces and wrapping them up in handkerchiefs and then dab them against Roy’s forehead.

"I told you," he whispers. "I told you not to go into that fucking filthy swamp. Fuck international relations with Aerugo, fuck ceremonies, fuck you for doing this to me.”

And the rest of Amestris, he doesn’t say. Who’s going to lead the way when their hope for the future dies of a foreign fever?

"Brother," Alphonse says, painfully gentle. "It’s not known how the tertian fever is spread. He may have contracted it anywhere. There have been cases even in Amestris."

Tertian fever, meaning every second day, for a week, ever since they returned from that diplomatic trip. Roy had been coerced into taking a summer recess along with Parliament, celebrating nine months of nonstop labor.

And of course he’d become ill the day they set foot in Resembool.

Ed had brought him here in attempts of—well, Al, never one to mince words, had said “seduction”. Ed had prepared for it: cleared Roy’s schedule with an equally scheming Hawkeye, laid in a stock of Roy’s favorite wine courtesy of Madam Christmas, and prepared/discarded about a thousand speeches, instead deciding simply to let his hands do the talking.

Only by the time their (discreet) entourage arrived at the little farm house, Roy had thrown up twice on the roadside. He’d brushed it off as motion sickness, and Ed had believed it, until Al said, a hand on Roy’s wrist, “General—you have a fever.”

Alphonse had at first diagnosed, tentatively, a mild summer bout of influenza.

Roy had, sulkily, acquiesced to bed rest. Hawkeye had told Ed stories of how horrible a patient Roy was, and Ed should have known to worry when Roy turned quiet and sleepy instead of belligerent.

And then two days ago the regular bouts of fever turned full-on paroxysm: Roy had stood up too fast and collapsed, striking his head against a table corner and nearly bleeding out, in Ed’s estimation, before Alphonse had found him. And he had been delirious by then, in so much pain that he bit his lips raw because Roy Mustang did not cry, not even when he was dying of a fucking lethal fever that Al’s medical books said was known to kill hundreds every rainy season. And there was no known treatment, no surefire cure, not in Aerugo and not in Xing and not in Amestris. There was only making patients comfortable until—

Not that comfort is easy to come by.

Roy’s joints swell red and hot and so painful that at times he literally cannot lift a finger. His breathing grows so labored that his lips turn dusky in fits and starts, he refuses anything other than ice chips past his lips. He turns icy cold with chills sometimes, and then just as suddenly burns so hot that Ed thinks, wonders, whether this is what it felt like to hold the flame of death in your raw and painful hands.

"You can’t die," he says aloud. "You’re not allowed to. I mean, for starters, Hawkeye would kill you. And then Hughes will kill you in the afterlife."

You can’t leave me.

Roy’s eyes snap open.

"I won’t die like this, I promise you," Roy mumbles through lips dry and cracked from sickness. His eyes are glassy, fever-blind, focused on somewhere behind Ed. "Because people like me—we don’t deserve to die quietly in bed."


End file.
